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Ciao bella! It's our second Maeve Binchy-cast of the season, with returning guest Sarah Maria Griffin. It’s the dawn of the Celtic Tiger in early nineties Ireland, and Nora O’Donoghue, or Signora, is returning home after over 20 years away. Having spent her youth in Sicily, in love with a married man, she has returned with no money, no friends and no prospects. She begins teaching italian at Mountainview school, where the beleaguered Aidan Dunne has just been passed over for the job of principal in favour of the womanising Tony O’Brien. Tony, meanwhile, is in love with Aidan’s adult daughter. The book follows every student in the evening class, subtly changing each of their destinies, and culminating with a trip to Italy at the end of the book.
Sarah Maria Griffin is an award winning novelist and zine maker, follower her at @griffski
Caroline O'Donoghue is a novelist, her latest novel, Scenes of a Graphic Nature, is out now. All Our Hidden Gifts is available for pre-order
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Get your Kelly bag and your load-bearing beams ready, this week we're talking about Diane Johnson's Le Divorce with real-life American Girl in Paris, Fiona Zublin! Isabel Walker is a young, bored film school graduate who has decamped to Paris to help her older sister Roxy, with her second pregnancy. Upon her arrival she discovers that Roxy has just been left by her French husband, Charles-Henri for another woman. As Roxy tries to negotiate French divorce courts and her estranged husbands family, Isabel slowly ingratiates herself into Paris life, becoming the mistress to Isabel’s 70 year old uncle-in-law, Edgar. When a valuable painting belonging to the Walker family gets implicated in the divorce, both families are forced to come together to find a way out.
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Merry Christmas everyone! Usually this time of year, you’d be in your childhood bedroom, re-reading the books that got you through primary school. This year, a lot of us can’t go home this Christmas, but there’s still every reason to revisit the books that made life better when you were nine. It might even make life better now? Caroline and occasional co-host Ella Risbridger talk about childhood reading habits, magazines, tough but beautiful Christmases, and why the Secret Garden is the greatest love triangle of all time.
We mention:
Tom's Midnight Garden
Charmed Life
Miss Happiness & Miss Flower
The Secret Garden
Back Home
the "My Story" books
The Illustrated Mum
The Suitcase Kid
The Lottie Project
Going Solo
Danny The Champion of The World
& more!
Caroline and Ella both have books for younger people coming out next year! Pick up The Secret Detectives by Ella Risbridger and All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O'Donoghue. See you in 2021!
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Scenes of a Graphic Nature has been out for over a month, so Caroline and Ella are talking about it! We say this is an 'all spoiler' edition, but in practice there are actually very few spoilers and a lot of discussion of grief, working together, how it feels when a book comes out, how perceptions of Ireland have changed in less than a decade, the use of music in the novel, friendship and porn. Buy the book!
https://www.waterstones.com/book/9780349009940
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07WN4QNYN/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
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This week we're talking about food, friendship and the cult favourite of Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin. Brian Eno once said that everyone who bought The Velvet Underground's first record went on to form a band, and the same can be said of Home Cooking and people who went on to write cookbooks. We talk about recipe writing, the godlike power of food writers, our dowdy twenties, tiny flats, and the uselessness of describing someone as "the new Nora Ephron".
Caroline O'Donoghue has two books out, the most recent of which is Scenes of a Graphic Nature and is available in all book shops. Ella Risbridger is the author of Midnight Chicken and Set Me On Fire, as well as a forthcoming children's fiction series The Secret Detectives.
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CONTENT WARNING: frequent, graphic mentions of suicide
We're back after a short break with more Covid-appropriate reading material, and what's more pandemic-y than The Virgin Suicides, a book where everyone dies and no one leaves their house. We talk about bad faith readings, Lolita, Sylvia Plath, the 'we' voice, suburbia, and Jeffrey's talent for smells.
Caroline O'Donoghue has two books out, the most recent of which is Scenes of a Graphic Nature and is available in all book shops from August 6th
Ella Risbridger is the author of Midnight Chicken and Set Me On Fire, as well as a forthcoming children's fiction series The Secret Detectives
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From the publisher's feed
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